A friend shared an article from Times Union (paywalled) claiming that more students pass after NY adjusts test scoring.
More students passed this year’s math and English tests, but many of them didn’t have to do as well as last year to be named proficient. After the passing score was adjusted, more than half of the students in grades 3 through 8 reached proficiency in English and math. In English, 53% of the students met the proficiency standard, up from 46% last year. In math, 55% of the students were considered proficient, up from 52% last year.
Two things did happen in New York with the 2025 end-of-year state tests: 1) passing scores, in terms of raw score points, did move and 2) more students did meet standards for some tests and grades.
However, technically, we can’t say the changes in passing scores caused the changes in proficiency rates, because the changes in passing scores came from equating adjustments that account for (small and unintentional) changes in test difficulty compared with prior years, and we can’t possibly know why proficiency rates changed because our cohorts of test takers vary so much over time.
I’ve talked about equating before. From a previous post:
Equating is a statistical procedure used to create a common measurement scale across two or more forms of a test. The main objective in this procedure is to control statistically for difficulty differences so that scores can be used interchangeably across forms.
In essence, with equating, if some test takers have a more difficult version of a test, they’ll get bonus points. Conversely, if we develop a new test form and discover it to be easier than previous ones, we can also take points away from new test takers. In each case, we’re aiming to establish more fair comparisons. In commercial testing operations, test takers aren’t aware of the score adjustments because they don’t see the raw score scale.
The Times Union article includes an explanation of equating from the state, so they seem to know what’s going on, but the rest of the article suggests that the state is fiddling with its numbers to get better results. This does happen occasionally in state testing – we know standards change and are sometimes lowered – but it isn’t happening here.